On June 22, the Women’s National Housing and Homelessness Network (WNHHN) submitted recommendations to the National Housing Council’s review panel on the lack of accessible housing in Canada.
Canada’s accessible housing shortage is not an abstract policy problem, it is a lived crisis. Seniors are living in hotels for lack of anywhere else to go. People with disabilities are being pressured out of their homes. Racialized people who have done everything asked of them still face discrimination at every turn. And the systems meant to help are too often performative, underfunded, or simply absent.
This week, WNHHN submitted testimony to the National Housing Council’s review panel on the lack of accessible housing in Canada. Our testimony, grounded in lived experience, evidence, and research identified the systemic gaps driving this crisis and what governments must do to address them.
Read our submission to the review panel here.
What’s getting in the way
Municipal, provincial, and territorial governments are primary obstacles. Officials have publicly acknowledged deliberately delaying actions—such as a motion to require landlords to register rental properties—while shifting back and forth on whether homelessness constitutes a crisis or a choice. Mental health and crisis infrastructure is inadequate: harm reduction sites in some provinces have been closed, hospitals are at capacity, and first responders are filling gaps that trained crisis workers should be filling.
Stigma runs deep throughout the disability support system, shaping how providers treat people on government assistance, how language around addiction and disability is framed, and how racialized individuals are received even after meeting every expectation placed on them. Engagement with people with lived experience is frequently performative, used to meet a quota rather than inform decisions.
What governments must do
The testimony calls for concrete action across several areas:
- Invest in accessible housing construction and protect seniors from displacement when existing units are deemed more suitable for other tenants
- Embed lived expertise meaningfully in policy development, with decision-makers who are prepared to listen, not just consult
- Reduce stigma systemically, including recognition that alcohol misuse and other coping behaviours are often rooted in trauma, not moral failure
- Improve front-line accountability, caseworkers, transit staff, and public workers must be held to standards of dignity in how they treat people receiving support
- Revisit benefits and program structures with direct input from the people they affect
- Be transparent about housing goals and the concrete steps required to reach them
- Account for climate change and its impacts on people with vulnerable health issues.
Read our 31 recommendations to the review panel here.
Housing is a human right and accessibility is part of that right
Accessible housing is not a luxury. For older adults and people with disabilities, features like step-free entrances, elevators, and proximity to services determine whether independent living is possible at all. When that housing is unavailable, the consequences are isolation, institutionalization, and preventable harm.
No one should be living in a hotel because the system has no room for them. No one should be displaced from their home because their unit is considered better suited for someone else. Governments at all levels must treat accessible housing as what it is: a fundamental right requiring urgent, coordinated, and accountable action.